The 2012 Senate Races: Missouri

Published in the November issue of Esquire, which closed a few weeks ago

McCaskill didn't have a prayer of reelection until the prayer amendment came along.

There were a couple other Republicans running for the right to defeat her, and one of them, former state treasurer Sarah Steelman, had been destroying McCaskill much of the year, maintaining a steady eight-point lead. Another candidate, a businessman named John Brunner, had actually been leading among primary voters early on. But as has happened with discouraging regularity for the past couple of election cycles, Republican primary voters blithely rejected the electable in favor of the extreme. Enter Todd Akin. Aided on primary day by a ballot measure to amend the Missouri constitution to expand "the existing right to worship God with a more explicit guarantee of public prayer and a new privilege for students to opt out of assignments that run contrary to their religious beliefs," Akin won the Senate primary by six points, easily beating Steelman and Brunner, and the prayer amendment revealed an interesting strain of current Republican thinking: More people went to the polls to vote for prayer than anything else on the ballot. The amendment passed with 83 percent of the vote, and Akin was the beneficiary of the spillover.

And neither was he hurt by a canny move by McCaskill herself, who ran ostensible attack ads against Akin in the primary, the purpose of which was actually to promote his image to conservative voters, with the ads pointing out that Akin had called President Obama "a complete menace to our civilization" and describing Akin as "just too conservative."

Akin's win in the primary set up a showdown with the embattled McCaskill, who was wounded last year when she was caught billing taxpayers for flights on a plane owned by her husband. But then, in a moment of pure grace or pure stupidity, McCaskill's own prayers were answered. In late August, when he was asked if he supported exceptions for rape in his opposition to abortion, Akin explained that pregnancy resulting from rape is "really rare.... If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

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Attacked from all sides, with Karl Rove pulling ad spending from the state and joking to donors about murdering the congressman, Akin took a steep dive in the polls. But hold on to your hats: He is undead.

Advantage: McCaskill

CLICK HERE FOR ONGOING COVERAGE OF THE RACE IN MISSOURI, AND HERE FOR MORE PREDICTIONS